Dr. Wilfred M. Post

Wilfred M. Post photographed the first Armenian deportations and got the pictures out of the country. He was one of two physicians in charge of the American Christian Hospital at Konia (Konya), where Emma Cushman was superintendent, and he came back there from furlough in the autumn of 1912. That December the American Red Cross put him in charge of relief for Muslim refugees displaced by the Balkan wars. In 1915, when the deportation trains began moving down the Berlin to Baghdad railway through Konia, Post ignored the ban on photographing Armenians, wrote the captions himself, and delivered the set to the American Embassy at Constantinople (Istanbul). The photographs are now in the National Archives.

He served on the American Persian Relief Commission in 1918. On 9 September 1922, he went into Smyrna (Izmir) by destroyer with the first Near East Relief unit, four days before the fire. The following year he volunteered alongside Christopher Thurber to fight typhus in the Selimieh barracks at Scutari (Üsküdar), where the death rate had reached one in a hundred a day, and a hundred burials were taking place after every sundown. He designed the protective clothing the workers wore against the lice that carry the disease. In 1928, he took charge of Near East Relief's medical work.